Truth as a Play of Forms
Björn Schmelzer is a conductor, writer, artist, filmmaker, anthropologist and the artistic leader of the Antwerp-based music ensemble Graindelavoix. The extensive research he does to produce the ensemble’s musical repertoire is further developed in essays, lectures and publications that situate his approach at the intersection of speculative theory, psychoanalysis, music and art history.
That ‘truth’ is not very popular today is an understatement. Yet artists cannot help but cling to it, out of necessity, to avoid falling into neoliberal relativism or postmodern perspectivism, trendy viewpoints that mainly seem to conceal a political and social status quo. Truth exists, although we know that the full truth never reveals itself as such. And art and music are exercise grounds for that truth. In the interpretation and performance of music, for example, you soon realise in practice how necessity and truth somehow belong together. The performer does everything to turn the initial contingency of the score, its infinite possibilities and performance options into consistency, to turn its creative arbitrariness into necessity, its subjective moments of coincidence into moments of truth. Art and music get us to explore that truth in practice, in creating horizons and situations where such a thing as truth can arise and be experienced. In that sense, a good performance is always plastic, because it makes it impossible for us simply to return to the neutrality of the score once the performance is over. A gripping performance is one that has adhered itself to the listener, hooked itself into the listener’s memory. That’s why a listening experience like that can have such a huge effect on the mood and thoughts of the listener. What is such a profound listening experience that entails irrevocable change, if not a moment of truth?
It’s understandable that the truth is frightening. Either it’s an absolute and dogmatic pretention for which art and music are the mouthpiece. That is often how we look at art from the past. Or it’s an experience so profound or shocking that it leaves us traumatised. That sometimes seems to be the ambition of a lot of contemporary art.
But what if moments of truth are lurking in the cracks and crannies of the works of art themselves, whether they are centuries old or produced in our time? What if those moments of truth are located at the intersection or in the gap between the work of art, its performance and the experience of it?
The English writer Walter Pater once claimed that all art aspires to the condition of music. A superficial reading of his claim might lead to the assumption that he favours the classical symbiosis of form and content. But what Pater is actually claiming is that all art seeks the experience of capturing the interval, the very passage of moments. And it is this dynamic of self-sabotage, of appearing and disappearing, that concerns art. Tragically enough, music itself is the first victim of its own artistic dynamic. For centuries, music seems to have fought for a fixed, recognisable, graspable form analogous to that of the visual arts. Once it had found that form, it didn’t take long before it gave it up again in favour of an infinite number of sound forms that are difficult to define and map. From the outset, polyphonic music has been the exploration of that anarchy of forms and of a temporal form that never entirely finds closure. It is the continually forming and deforming form of music itself that enables us to experience moments of truth.